Tuesday, 30 March 2021

19. Karmann Ghia Restoration - Body Prep

 


Well it's time for hours and hours of body preparation and some final welding.  So starting at the front of my Karman Ghia Convertible I began the slow process of rubbing down and filling. I decided to slowly work my way around the car and started with the front valance. Because this car has had so many replacement panels, blending in the joints between old and new panels required multiple layers of filler and shaping then more filler etc.

But slowly the car began to turn from orange to grey. One of the biggest problems was to get the two rear wings the same shape. As I mentioned before, this car had had accident damage on the  left side so when I stood at the back of the car and looked at the two rear wings, it was obvious that the right wing had a good bulbus curve on it and that the left rear wing was much flatter. Now the problem was how to replicate the curve on the right wing onto the left.




To achieve this I bought a long 20" Shape Gauge and used it to capture the shape of the right wing and then transferred the gauge over to the left wing and built up the filler over multiple layers until the gauge fitted over the curve the same on both wings.





 




The next big problem was the bulkhead panels behind the back seat and over the gearbox. After very long consideration of the possibilities of making patches for this panel, which was really badly perforated, I finally decided to buy a new panel and cut the areas out that needed replacing.

So out came the angle grinder again and large pieces of the new panel were grafted in.



You will notice that the step in front of the replaced panel, that supports the seat, is also in a bad way. So the next step was to cut this out too and fabricate a new one.

In recent weeks I have been approaching various paint sprayers with a view to finally getting the finished coat on the body. I have been amazed at the enormous differences between quotes, but I think that I have finally decided upon the right supplier.



One final bit is that my tyres have finally arrived and I was able to get them fitted to the wheels, but fitting the wheels is a long way away at the moment.
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